Critical Asian Studies

Books

Over the years, a number of books have been published from articles that appeared in the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars (1968–2000) and Critical Asian Studies (2001– ). These books are available directly from the publishers.

Rachel Murphy and Vanessa Fong, eds.

How are different groups of people such as sex workers, migrant workers, rural cadres, and homosexuals represented in China’s media? How accurately do representations created by the media reflect the lived experiences of Chinese people? Do Chinese people accept the representations and messages disseminated by the media? Can they use the media to portray their own interests? How are media practices in China changing? Have new technologies and increased access to international media opened up new spaces for struggle in China? The essays in this volume address these questions by using a combination of ethnography and textual analysis and by exploring representation in and usage of a range of media, including instant messaging, the internet, television, films, magazines, and newspapers. The essays highlight the richness, diversity, and sometimes contradictory tendencies of the meanings and consequences of media representations in China. The volume cautions against approaches that take the representations created by the media in China at face value and against oversimplified assumptions about the motivations and agency of players in the complex struggles that occur between the media, the Chinese state, and Chinese citizens.

This book was published as a thematic issue of Critical Asian Studies 39:1 (2007). ISSN 1467-2715.

Class explains much in the differentiation of life chances and political dynamics in South Asia; scholarship from the region has contributed much to class analysis. Yet class has lost its previous centrality as a way of understanding the world and how it changes. This outcome is puzzling; new configurations of global economic forces and policy have widened gaps between classes and across sectors and regions, altered people’s relations to production, and produced new state-citizen relations. Does market triumphalism or increased salience of identity politics render class irrelevant? Has rapid growth in aggregate wealth obviated long-standing questions of inequality and poverty? Explanations for what happened to class vary, from intellectual fads to global transformations of interests. The authors of articles in this book ask what is lost in the move away from class, and what do South Asian experiences tell us about the limits of class analysis. Empirical chapters examine formal and informal-sector labor, social movements against genetic engineering, and politics of the “new middle class.” A unifying analytical concern is specifying conditions under which interests of those disadvantaged by class systems are immobilized, diffused, coopted — or autonomously recognized and acted upon politically: the problematic transition of classes in themselves to classes for themselves.

This book was published as a thematic issue of Critical Asian Studies 38:4 (2006) and 39:1 (2007). ISSN 1467-2715.

Garry Rodan and Kevin Hewison, eds.

Key events in Asia’s recent history have included the end of the cold war, the Asian Economic Crisis, and the war on terror. The articles in this volume offer a critical assessment of these events and of the interplay of security and economics in shaping political regimes and modifying market systems. Based on the notion that market systems are inherently political and conflict-ridden, this collection clarifies and explains the conflicts shaping the path of neoliberal globalization. Collectively it represents a disciplined and systematic address of four overarching questions:

What are the significant conflicts emanating from neoliberal globalization, and what are their implications?

What are the implications of new security concerns for these conflicts, and what are their impacts?

How are conflicts associated with globalization and security affecting social and economic policy directions?

Can these directions be reconciled with the reproduction of existing political regimes, or do they threaten their basis?

In addressing these questions, the essays depict neoliberal globalization in the new security context as being able to accommodate a range of political regimes. This fascinating collection is a must-read for those with a professional interest in the region post-9/11.

This book was previously published as a thematic issue of Critical Asian Studies 36:3+4 (2004). ISSN 1467-2715.

Since January 2004, the three Muslim-dominated provinces of Pattani, Yala, and Narathiwat in the Thai south have been ablaze with political violence. Early incidents such as the bloody storming of the historic Kru-Ze mosque and the death of seventy-eight Tak Bai protestors at the hands of the army made global headlines. But most of the subsequent events have gone largely unnoticed despite a terrible catalogue of "daily killings." The Thaksin Shinawatra government's persistent mishandling of the southern violence was a key factor behind the September 2006 military coup d'etat, the biggest political upheaval in Thailand since the early 1990s. This collection of articles by Thai and international scholars examines the reasons behind the unrest in south Thailand from a variety of perspectives. The contributors all reject the simplistic mantras of "terrorism experts" and call for a more nuanced, subtle, and critical reading of events. Their topics include the political meanings of history and monuments, the ambiguous role of the Thaksin government, alternative explanations of the violence, the salience of political Islam, the voices of ordinary people in Pattani, and the misleading paradigms of the insecurity industry. This book will change the way the southern Thailand conflict is understood.

This book was previously published as a thematic issue of Critical Asian Studies 38:1 (2006). ISSN 1467-2715.

Ben Kiernan, ed. Caroline Hughes, consulting ed.

In the thirty years after World War II, Cambodia witnessed the reassertion of colonial power, the spread of nationalism, the birth and growth of a communist party, the achievement of independence, the stifling reform during the decade of peace, the rise of an armed domestic insurgency, the encroachment of an international war, massive bombardment and civilian casualties, pogroms, and ethnic "cleansing" of religious minorities. From 1975 to 1979, genocide took another 1.7 million lives. Then, after liberation from the Khmer Rouge regime, Cambodia survived a decade of foreign occupation, international isolation, and guerrilla terror and harassment. UN intervention and democratic transition were followed by Cambodia's defeat of the Khmer Rouge in 1999 amid continuing internal tension and political confrontation. Against this backdrop of more than thirty years of conflict in Cambodia, Conflict and Change in Cambodia brings together primary documents and secondary analyses that offer fresh and informed insights into Cambodia's political and environmental history.

This book was previously published as a thematic issue of Critical Asian Studies 34:4 (2002). ISSN 1467-2715.

China, socialism, and especially China's three-decades-long experiment in building socialism have been issues of much interest and debate among scholars and practicing Marxists in India and elsewhere. These analysts also examine the realities of post-Mao China and how these have been impacting the lives of peasants and workers in that society, as well as face the question of today's China being a development model for other third world countries. In mid-2005 several editors of Critical Asian Studies (formerly the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars) convened in a Roundtable to engage the issues raised by Martin Hart-Landsberg and Paul Burkett in their book China and Socialism: Market Reforms and Class Struggle (Monthly Review Press, 2005). The articles published in this Roundtable, along with a Rejoinder by Hart-Landsberg and Burkett, appeared in two issues of Critical Asian Studies (37:3 and 4) in 2005. They, along with an Introduction by Hari P. Sharma, are reprinted here in Critical Perspectives on China's Economic Transformation in order to stimulate further discussion. As Hari P. Sharma writes in the Introduction: "It is our task to learn the positive and negative lessons from the Chinese experience and carry on with the task of fighting and defeating imperialism and its hold, wherever we live, as well as to lend support to the struggles for national liberation and for socialism, wherever they take place."

This book was previously published as a Roundtable in Critical Asian Studies 37:3 and 37:4 (2005). ISSN 1467-2715.

East Timor is at last, and at terrible human cost, firmly on the road to independence. The significance of its passage to freedom – for its people, for Asia, and for the world – is manifold. This volume offers a comprehensive overview of East Timor's travail and its triumph in its international context. East Timor's independence constitutes one of the final and most poignant moments in a long and bitter history of European colonization and decolonization. For the people of East Timor, independence from Portugal in 1975 was only the beginning of a new struggle against Indonesian invaders – a struggle that took the lives of 200,000 East Timorese – and one that is by no means over. The case of East Timor, both during and after the cold war, provides a litmus test for issues of international responsibility, posing questions of double standards in unusually clear-cut form. It reveals the active support by the United States and other powers for the military forces of Indonesia throughout the years of that nation's invasion and repression of East Timor, until 1998 when the collapse of the Indonesian dictatorship ushered in a new phase in the East Timorese struggle.

The essays in Part I, "East Timor: Resistance, Repression, and the Road to Independence," explore the dynamics of the long struggle for independence, from Portugal and then Indonesia, focusing particularly on the role of the National Council of Timorese Resistance and the Catholic Church. Part II, "Referendum and Independence," provides four eyewitness accounts of the 1999 UN-sponsored referendum and the concomitant militia violence supported by the Indonesian military. Part III, "East Timor, the United States, and the World Community," examines international dimensions of the struggle. Part IV, "East Timor and Indonesia," looks at the changing character of the Indonesian state and the significance of East Timor in Indonesian political developments. The final section, "The Future of East Timor," considers the prospects for an independent East Timor, charting the potential shoals that lie ahead.

This provocative collection of essays addresses ongoing controversies over coverage of World War II in Japanese, German, and U.S. textbooks. The book shows how sanitized treatments of war crimes, racism, and other injustices have mobilized fierce debate internationally as well as within the three countries. Together these essays paint a compelling picture of how official narratives of a country's past both shape and are shaped by the citizen's view of the nation. Specific issues discussed include the Japanese movement to "correct" history; identity and transnationalization in German textbooks; the Vietnam War in high school American History; the teaching of Japan's colonization of Korea in Japanese and Korean schools; Holocaust education for youth in the New Germany; and how American and Japanese educators teach the Pacific War.

The development and use of the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki rank among the formative national experiences for both Japanese and Americans, and indeed, these events have etched themselves into the consciousness of people throughout the globe as seminal events shaping the postwar era. The contested legacies and memories of the bomb have shaped the self-image of and interactions between both peoples: for Americans, the dominant story is that the bombs provided an appropriate and necessary conclusion to a just war; for Japanese, the bomb remains a powerful symbol of their victimization by American power. But this volume does more than convey the official story viewed from across the Pacific. This first effort to view the issues from both American and Japanese perspectives shows how the issues have been contested both within and across nations in the course of fifty years, and why they remain controversial into the twenty-first century.

The scholarly analyses and literary portraits in this text elucidate the existing realities of Japan's postwar history. Drawing attention to the unresolved conflicts beneath the smooth surface of capitalism, they fill in awkward gaps in our understanding of contemporary Japan and underline the urgency of finding alternatives. This revised edition of The Other Japan (originally edited by Patricia Tsurumi) addresses in chronological fashion major social, environmental, and feminist issues and conflicts that have attended Japan's postwar "economic miracle." Brief introductions to each chapter present these issues and conflicts as phenomena tightly linked to the processes of Japanese capitalism.